This week's CultCast...

We’ve canceled our MacBook Pro order! It’s true, and we’ll you why… Plus: we compare new MacBook Pro’s performance to older models and similarly priced machines; Apple call it quits on external displays; and, the end of an era—one of Mac’s most iconic features gets retired.

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The KGI Securities analyst told investors in a recent note that he expects Apple will bring big price-cuts to the MacBook Pro along with some internal upgrades. Kuo also claims the 2017 update will finally give the MacBook Pro up to 32GB of RAM.

KabyLake CPUs will be used if Intel’s Cannonlake chips aren’t ready. That will keep max RAM support at 16GB for another year.

Price cuts on the next MacBook Pro won’t arrive until the second half of 2017 though.

The days of Apple making its own stand-alone displays for the Mac Mini and Mac Pro are dead.

Apple revealed a new 5K 27-inch Thunderbolt 3 display during its “Hello Again” keynote yesterday, only instead of being made by Apple, the company partnered with LG to create the monitor.

The Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel tweeted that, after asking about it at the Hello Again event, was informed by Apple that “it’s out of the stand-alone display biz.”

Apple did add some tech to LG’s display so that it integrates better with Macs. You can adjust the brightness settings on the LG 5K UltraFine display from your Mac, rather than pushing buttons on the display itself.

The new MacBook Pro jettisons the iconic F-sharp sound Apple uses to show a Mac is booting up.

The use of an arpeggiated chord when you started your Mac dates back to the Macintosh II, when software engineer Mark Lentczner incorporated it into the system.

The sound was later revised by Jim Reekes, Apple’s senior software engineer in charge of the audio and system sounds, during the 1990s. Over the years, its tone has changed further and the instrumentation has also varied.

The reason for getting rid of the sound instead has to do with the fact that the new laptops now turn on from a fully switched-off mode if they’re opened — meaning you can save all that energy you would otherwise have expended pressing the power button.